On July 9th, 2021, 1-3 PM UTC,  the Networking Friday on the All-Atlantic Pledging Campaign will discuss the existing committed solutions and the way forward to better understand, care and protect our threatened Atlantic ocean. Every day we hear or read about the ever-growing list of threats that our ocean is now facing due mostly by human action or inaction. From global warming and habitat destruction to marine pollution and overfishing, marine ecosystems and biodiversity are severely impacted, so urgent global action is needed to immediately revert current trends and to broadly restore and preserve the ocean’s health for future generations. The All-Atlantic Pledging Campaign is a long-term initiative to collect voluntary, result-oriented, personal or institutional commitments to contribute to provide solutions to the many challenges that the Atlantic Ocean holds for people living on its shores and consolidate them on an ocean basin scale, always taking into account specific local, national and regional contexts. The campaign is taking place thanks to an online collaborative platform for advancing or initiating cooperation in the Atlantic region aimed at advancing the so called All-Atlantic Ocean Research Alliance and the implementation of the Galway Statement (2013) and the Belém Statement (2018) as well as the bilateral Administrative Arrangements between the European Commission and Argentina (2018), Cape Verde (2018) and Morocco (2020).

The Pledging Campaign was launched during the All-Atlantic2021 Conference  and 32 pledges were submitted as of now.

Under the motto “TIME TO ACT: The Atlantic Ocean needs more than flowing words” institutions and stakeholders from along and across the Atlantic Ocean are committing their research and innovation solutions in response to common challenges to better understand, care and protect our threatened Atlantic Ocean in one the following thematic areas:

• Ocean Health: climate variability and ecosystem approaches
• Ocean Technology
• Ocean observation, forecasting and monitoring
• Marine pollution
• Food security, ocean resources and biodiversity
• Polar research

Moderator

Isabel Sousa Pinto

Prof Isabel Sousa Pinto has a PhD in Marine Biology (phycology) from the UCSB, USA. She is a Professor at the University of Porto and Head of the Aquatic Biodiversity and Conservation group at Interdisciplinary Centre for Marine and Environmental Research (CIIMAR). She is also member of its Board of Directors. Her main research has been on marine biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, and how is impacted by climate change, invasive species and other anthropogenic drivers. She has a particular focus on the seaweed flora as well as on algal ecophysiology, cultivation and promotion of its sustainable use and was member of the POGO working group “Planning the implementation of a global long-term observing and data sharing strategy for macroalgal communities”. She is also working on the science-policy – society interfaces and on promoting ocean literacy. She is serving in different European and International steering Committees as Euromarine, European Ocean Observation System (EOOS) and AtlantOS to develop the biodiversity component of the Ocean Observations and its integration with the other observation components and with the European Marine Board in to identify gaps in biological observations and produce recommendations to fill them. At global level she is the co-chair of MBON – Marine Biodiversity Observation Network from GEO BON.

She was part of the Portuguese delegation to the Convention on Biological Diversity (2006-2011) and has been since working with IPBES – the Intergovernamental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, was the Portuguese Representative in this platform until 2018, when was elected to its Multidisciplinary Expert Panel, a panel that supervises the scientific work of the Platform, becoming later also co-chair of its Knowledge and Data task force. Besides more than 180 scientific publications, she was a Coordinating Lead Author for the Regional Assessemnt of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in Europe and Central Asia of IPBES.

We will continue with the Networking Fridays during the next months. More information about future sessions as well as presentations and videos from previous sessions can be found here. Twitter Hashtag: #netfridays. Expect some very exciting afternoons, or mornings or evenings, depending on where you are…

If you need any additional information please send an email to Jose Luiz Moutinho.